“Mr. President. We need a leader who will lead us to the moment…who will help define what the challenges of meeting the moment means… and then not to be cautious and safe and sit back and wait for someone else to do the hard work, but to get out of your chair and start doing the hard work yourself to make America a greater place,” – New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s forum.
This is one of those cases where I am unhappy to report that I was quite correct and so were several others about what removing Mubarak would mean for the United States, Israel and the Middle-East.
Barack Obama has managed to pull off the greatest foreign policy disaster since President Carter helped the Mullah’s come to power in Iran. Mubarak was far from perfect, but he helped keep arms out of Gaza, maintained the peace with Israel, and prevented civil war between the Coptic Christians and the hard-core Islamists.
The results of the Egyptian election is in. Anyone who says that the hardcore Islamists are just a tiny fraction of Muslims is lying to themselves and to you as these election results demonstrate.
Parties that want an expansion of Islamic law captured a clear majority of the votes in Egypt’s first election since the uprising that ousted longtime authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak, according to results released Sunday.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party topped winners with 37% of the nearly 10 million valid ballots cast for party lists in the first of three electoral rounds for the Egyptian parliament.
The Brotherhood, a movement that seeks to expand Islamic law in many countries in the Middle East, prevailed in an election that included voters in Cairo and Alexandria, cities where liberal parties had hoped to exhibit their greatest strength.
Also winning big was the Nour Party, which took 24% of the vote. The party, dominated by the ultraconservative Salafis, did not exist until a few months ago. It seeks to impose strict Islamic law similar to Saudi Arabia in which women must be veiled and alcohol banned.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Al-Qaeda and they are involved in raising money for jihadists here in the United States. The motto for the Muslim Brotherhood is:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Make no mistake, the Muslim Brotherhood, who won 37% of the vote, is a very patient and a very slick with the propaganda version of Al-Qaeda. The Muslim Brotherhood has seduced the progressive secular left, the State Department, and some naive neocons such as Bill Kristol along with several RNC luminaries (who are friends of mine and will go un-named). The Nour Party, which is essentially Egypt’s version of the Taliban, won 24% of the vote; meaning that 61% of the country voted for Sharia Law, war with Israel, brutal oppression for women and minorities, and martyrdom in the cause of Jihad.
Here is Bill Kristol in February 2011, recent history has proved him, and the many who believed just as he did, how fantastically wrong they have been. Fortunately Liz Cheney was not fooled for a minute:
Glenn Beck was right, so was Niall Ferguson, and so was this very writer.
One can examine the degree of just how far the denial went, much of it in order to protect President Obama, please examine this video from last February when one of the greatest historians alive explained to MSNBC just how strategically flawed the Obama policy in Egypt was. After Prof. Ferguson crushed the point of view of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, they went right back to “the operation looked like it went well to me”:
This is no surprise. In 2009 I was said repeatedly on my old college blog that ObamaCare was designed to blow up the system by driving prices and taxes up, by creating an impossible regulatory environment, and by a series of “incentives” that encourage people to make decisions that make the system less feasible as time goes on. Shortly after I said that ObamaCare creates an economic death spiral (known as an adverse selection spiral) of bad incentives that encourage people to game the system; each decision that you take for your own best interests helps to bankrupt the system.
Minnesota Public Radio reports, “A loophole in the federal health care overhaul would allow many employers to game the system by dumping their sicker employees [into] public health insurance exchanges, according to two University of Minnesota law professors.” Such “targeted dumping” of sicker employees would cause Obamacare’s taxpayer-subsidized exchanges to cost more — potentially far more — than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected.
The CBO has already badly misjudged the number of employees who would lose their employer-sponsored insurance under Obamacare. The CBO projected that, from 2010 to 2011, a net of 6 million Americans wouldgain employer-sponsored insurance in the wake of Obamacare’s passage (see table 4). But Gallup has found that, since President Obama signed Obamacare into law in March 2010, 4.5 million Americans have losttheir employer-sponsored insurance. In other words, the CBO’s estimate is off by about 10 million people already.
“[T]here is a substantial prospect that ACA [Obamacare] will lead some, and perhaps many, employers to implement a targeted dumping strategy designed to induce low-risk employees to retain ESI [employer-sponsored insurance] but incentivize high-risk employees to voluntarily opt out of ESI and instead purchase insurance through the exchanges that ACA establishes to organize individual insurance markets. Although ACA and other federal laws prohibit employers from excluding high-risk employees from ESI, these laws do little to prevent employers from designing their plans and benefits to incentivize high-risk employees to voluntarily seek coverage elsewhere. If successful, such a targeted dumping strategy would allow employers and low-risk employees to avoid the costs associated with providing coverage to high-risk employees….”
The authors note that employers who did this “would avoid any financial penalties under the so-called individual and employer ‘mandates.’”
[Note, this story is stickied to the top of the page as it is our feature of the week. Please scroll down to see new posts and updates!]
by PoliticalArena.org Editor Chuck Norton
Sometimes beltway wisdom can reflect certain truths not apparent to many nice folks in “fly over country”, but often the beltway wisdom caters to government largess and the message can be sold to large donors and bundlers.
Inside the beltway, insiders from both parties treat small government conservatives as “extreme” because all of them make their money from government largess either directly or indirectly. There are also factors that swing the public that those inside the beltway never get exposed to. The greatest example of this was in 1976 and in 1980 when “insiders” believed that Ronald Reagan was a joke, a stupid B-movie actor whose eloquent speeches about the dangers of communism, socialism and collectivism should have went out with the 1950’s. Now those same pundits claim to be the very fathers of his success. While some of the names of the insiders and pundits have changed, the beltway mentality has not.
Please examine these comments from the insiders poll at National Journal and enjoy my comments which will appear in red.
The Gingrich Moment has yet to catch on with National Journal‘s Political Insiders. Despite former House Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s surge in the Republican presidential nomination contest, overwhelming majorities of both Democratic and Republican Insiders still say former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has the better shot at beating President Obama in 2012.
[This is what the left and the elite media say. They said the same thing about McCain and Dole. The elite media is essentially the Democrat media complex, so if Mitt Romney is so much of a threat why are they avoiding piling on and trashing Romney like they have the other candidates? In each case where the most “moderate” candidate was considered the most electable the Democrat campaigned to the right of the GOP nominee and won. When there is a bold difference between the two candidates the conservative Republican wins.
Some insiders know this and are simply rooting for the two candidates who are most likely to guarantee continued government largess. Other insiders start out with the best of intentions, but end up adopting the very mentality that they came to DC to change in the first place. Having been to DC events I can tell you that the temptation to meld in to that mentality is highly seductive. Make no mistake, the media and the White House want to run against Romney and several White House staffers have let that leak out. They believe that the same strategy the GOP used against John Kerry in 2004 can be used against Mitt Romney. They also believe that Obama can fool voters by campaigning to the right of Romney’s record. They will say that Romney talks like Reagan, but governed like Dukakis. Obama will also run against what he will describe as a namby-pamby do nothing Congress that talks about grandiose reforms but ends up with a schizophrenic big government record like Romney’s. ]
For some of the Insiders, Romney’s well-oiled campaign and potential for moderate appeal gave him the edge.
[The well oiled campaign with huge state machines is not as overwhelmingly effective as it used to be for two reasons.
The first reason is that with the power of the internet and multiple 24 hours news channels voters have more unfiltered access to information and the candidates. Herman Cain had almost no ground machine to speak of, and the truth is that if it weren’t for his repeated stumbling when it comes to basic foreign policy questions and messaging, he would still be the front-runner. The allegations of sexual harassment by women, all of whom have direct ties to David Axelrod and the Chicago Democrat machine were so transparent, that most people were not swayed by them. The fact that the Cain allegations didn’t stick in spite of a massive elite media campaign to try to make them otherwise is yet another indicator of just how powerful new media really is (note, remember when Cain was asked if he would take a lie detector test about the allegations and he said yes? Only local media shared the results). A wealthy massive machine is no longer necessary to get a message out.]
“He [Romney] almost beat a liberal icon in a blue state and went on to win the governor’s race,” said one Democratic Insider. “He is a very strong general-election candidate.”
[And Newt nationalized a mid-term election, brought in a GOP majority in the House for the first time in 40 years, cut taxes, balanced the federal budget, created a surplus, and passed welfare reform with a Democrat President, yet our Democratic insider knows that. Also, since when has Massachusetts ever been a political gauge for the rest of the country? ]
“Mitt Romney is better positioned to speak to independent voters,” said another Democrat, “including key voting blocs like swing unmarried women.” A Republican strategist agreed. “Romney is more acceptable to moderate voters, especially female voters.”
[Nonsense. And this brings us to the second reason why massive state machines on the ground are not as effective as they used to be. Those machines were needed to get the attention of ordinarily more apathetic independent voters (and conservatives could not be more motivated already). Independent voters have been anything but apathetic since 2009. Independents are engaged and informed in a way I thought I would never see again in my lifetime. They are also far from what beltway insiders would consider moderate.
In questionnaires about civics and current events independents score almost as high as Republican voters, before 2009 they scored below Democrat voters.
In the 2009 state and local elections voters swung towards GOP/TEA candidates by 18 points in the key swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania. The independent voters in those key swing states were not energized by a “moderate message”. They were energized by the bold TEA Party message of Rick Santelli and Sarah Palin. In New Jersey the firebrand fiscal hawk Chris Christie was elected governor.
In 2010 GOP/TEA Party candidates swept the elections in nine of the top ten swing states. For the first time since 1984 when Ronald Reagan won 49 states, traditionally independent and slightly left leaning voters such as women and Catholics voted Republican by big numbers. There is no way that anyone could say that they were energized by Mitt Romney or anyone like him. Florida, which Obama won, tossed out their own Republican Governor Charlie Crist who was a wishy-washy Mitt Romney like moderate, and replaced him with reaganesque Marco Rubio. Governor Crist tried to take the independent vote away from Rubio by running as an independent and guarantee the Democrats a win, but independent voters such as women and Catholics voted for Rubio by significant margins.]
Other Republican Insiders named Romney as the stronger candidate, but couldn’t muster much enthusiasm about the prospect.
“Romney’s shape-shifting might not be appealing for conservatives in the primary, but he’s far more disciplined than Gingrich and is the only candidate that can win in November,” said one Republican.
[Romney is more disciplined, but not as disciplined as one might think, already since the debates started Romney has changed his messaging and positions. What is the bold Romney vision for America other than “I’m not Barack Obama and don’t I look sweet on TV? Also Newt has come back from the early missteps in his campaign with a new discipline and has avoided his previous academics ways of getting himself off message with excessive nuance.]
“Mitt Romney will be hard to hate in the general for the same reason he is hard to love in a primary,” said another Republican. “There isn’t much ‘there’ there, so the spotlight will gravitate to Obama. Romney makes it a referendum on Obama; Gingrich makes it a choice.”
[Indeed, 1980 could have been a referendum about Carter, but Ronald Reagan went out of his way to make it a choice. Gingrich gives you something to vote for.]
Concerns about Romney’s charisma led a small number of Insiders on both sides of the spectrum made the case for Gingrich as the stronger Obama opponent. “Romney seems like he is the most formidable on paper and in debates,” said one Democrat, “but the American people will struggle to take to him, just as the Republicans are struggling to take to him.” “The president’s money will dwarf ours,” warned a Republican strategist. “So our candidate must frame his message more clearly and forcefully. That’s Newt’s strength and that’s Romney’s weakness.”
[Hey someone in DC is thinking! Obama and his team led by David Axelrod will try to mottle everything, change history, and make the facts into a soup until people don’t know what to think. Newt has the boldness and razor like clarity in his presentation that can cut through the nonsense.]
Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are for Mitt Romney. Why?
Ann & Laura are singularly focused on Romney’s ability to speak and have been quite up front about this when discussing it.
I understand their point of view, but I do not totally agree with it. During the Bush administration while I was getting my latest degree at IU, I had to constantly defend what the administration was doing right because the administration made almost no attempt to articulate it themselves (with the exception of hiring Tony Snow).
This became very tiresome and was a reason why the GOP got pasted in 2006 and 2008. Since communication is the life of Ann and Laura (and it is my life too) I see how their point of view can be so unbalanced.
When George W. Bush was debating John Kerry can anyone honestly say that Bush dominated Kerry in any of those debates? Yet Bush still won convincingly.
The want to have Romney for the reasons stated is defensive in nature. Just as the Democrats picking Dukakis was defensive, picking Mondale was defensive, and picking Kerry was defensive. They were all picked because the Democrats “settled” on who they thought was “electable”. The GOP did this with Dole and McCain and today many “insiders” want to follow that line of thinking for 2012. Don’t be fooled.
Ann and Laura had a conversation on The Laura Ingraham Show and agreed that Mitt Romney will never be as conservative after the primary as he is now, and he will not be as conservative in the White House as he would be in the General Election. They both laughed and said how it will work out great for them because they will have yet another [liberal] Republican that they can make fun of for four years.
The state of the country is so dire that we no longer can afford the luxury of having a president talk radio can make fun of.
Herman Cain debated Newt in a long format one on one and came out OK, so what is the problem Mitt?
Aren’t the American people deserving of a long format conversation that isn’t just cute 30 second responses? Mitt is trying to run out the clock and hope for a win without really fighting for it.
We all know Mitt’s past and we all know Gingrich’s. Both candidates in the past have had some foolish positions. The difference is not just some of the foolish positions that have come out of their mouths, but what they have actually implemented into law.
Mitt has the RomneyCare albatross around his neck which is too similar to ObamaCare. Gingrich talked about a health insurance mandate as a part of a thought experiment with a think tank and rejected the idea after a time because he concluded that a government powerful enough to impose such a mandate would also be a heavy handed disaster. Romney actually imposed a mandate. Both candidates say they are pro-life now, but as a matter of legislation only one has signed laws that have taxpayers pay for abortions and that is Mitt Romney.
Newt Gingrich has actually balanced the US budget, reformed entitlements and welfare into better working programs and Newt helped draft the Medicare Part D which came in 40% under budget. Newt blabs a lot, he is an academic and 50 odd sounding ideas will come out of his mouth every day, Newt’s mouth and academic way of thinking makes Newt his own worst enemy, but when you look at what laws were passed and how budgets were balanced Newt gets the job done and knows how to nationalize elections and get the American people behind an agenda he has sold on the merit. What has Mitt Romney actually DONE to advance the conservative movement or even protect traditional Americanism?
Newt has said a lot of things that are just dumb or were unfairly demagogued and lied about, but Newt admits these mistakes and does not sugar coat them. Mitt Romney lies about his. I have not caught Newt in a fib in any of the debates. I cannot say the same about Romney.
Newt is not afraid of the media and will take them on when needed, this is critically important to both the election and the fourth estate as a check and balance. The elite media is supposed to be helping keep government in check and instead most of what we get from them is cheer-leading for a leviathan state.
Newt Gingrich has been plugging away against Obama’s bad policies since 2009 and has been defending us in the elite media since Obama took office. Newt defended Sarah Palin as the press trashed her when we now know that on issue after issue after issue from death Panels, to ObamaCare costs, to the cronyism, to energy policy, to Egypt & Libya, to inflation and the increasing food problem that Palin has been almost prophetic in her correctness. Where was Mitt Romney in 2009 and 2010 when you and I were out protesting in the cold, raising awareness, networking to educate people, and raising funds for local candidates?
When history looks at who advanced the conservative movement the most Newt comes in second only to Ronald Reagan. Newt is featured in almost every political science textbook for his achievements. Newt’s name will always be remembered along the names of Reagan, Taft, Coolidge and Goldwater.
If this does end up as a race between Newt and Mitt, the choice of who to endorse is obvious.
This happens every year. Hiring picks up in the retail and service sector for the Christmas season. There is no way that this can be unexpected, but the implication is that “Obama’s policies are finally working”.
Next month the reports on consumer spending will show that they went up in December with the spin that it is all because Obama is great, but the truth is that consumer spending always goes up in December. In February and early March the elite media will say that “unemployment went up unexpectedly” and “consumer spending dropped unexpectedly”. Why? Holiday help will get laid off and the credit card bills will start coming in.
Another reason that unemployment has dropped unexpectedly is that a reported 315,000 people have given up looking for a job. That artificially lowers the government unemployment number.
Job gains in the U.S. picked up last month and the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to the lowest level since March 2009, a decline augmented by the departure of Americans from the labor force.
Payrolls climbed 120,000, after a revised 100,000 increase in October, with more than half the hiring coming from retailers and temporary help agencies, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a 125,000 gain. The jobless rate declined to 8.6 percent from 9 percent.
“It’s good news, not great news,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, whose forecast matched the survey median. “The labor market is gradually healing.”
What nonsense, because way down deep in the article, they finally tell you the truth [Note – reporters know that most people never read beyond the 5th paragraph in most any article]:
Employment at service-providers increased 126,000 in November, including a 50,000 gain in retail trade as companies began hiring for the holiday shopping season. The number of temporary workers increased 22,300.
Macy’s, the second-biggest U.S. department-store chain, increased mostly part-time staff by 4 percent for the November-December shopping season. See’s Candies Inc., a chocolate maker owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said it would add 5,500 mostly temporary workers.
Still, factory payroll growth slowed and construction employment dropped. Government payrolls decreased by 20,000 in November, including a 16,000 decline on the state and local levels.
More on “Unexpected”
Enjoy this piece from my old college blog where I had some fun with the elite media economists where they declared every piece of bad news “unexpected” for two years while they were spinning positive for Obama:
In February or March we will be told that factory orders for consumer goods are up “unexpectedly” which is a positive sign that Obama is the best president ever. The truth is that it will be the result of totally expected inventory restocking after the holiday season.
Jobless claims are over 400,000 again this week. Last month “Hope” was alive because new claims had dropped below 400,000 to 397,000, which is statistically insignificant:
Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a hopeful sign that the job market might be picking up.
The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly applications dropped 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 397,000, the lowest level in five weeks. It’s only the third time since April that applications have fallen below 400,000.
Were saved! Most every week claims are above 400,000 it is unexpected and each time below it is because we have the hopeful if not smoking hot economy. Gimme a break.
Gallup Polling firm’s daily presidential job approval index put the current president‘s job approval rating at 43 percent compared to President Jimmy Carter’s 51 percent:
The job approval numbers for other presidents at this stage of their terms, a year before the re-election campaign:
— Harry S. Truman: 54 percent.
— Dwight Eisenhower: 78 percent.
— Lyndon B. Johnson: 44 percent.
— Richard M. Nixon: 50 percent.
— Ronald Reagan: 54 percent.
— George H.W. Bush: 52 percent.
— Bill Clinton: 51 percent.
— George W. Bush: 55 percent.
What’s more, Gallup finds that Obama’s overall job approval rating so far has averaged 49 percent. Only three former presidents have had a worse average rating at this stage: Carter, Ford, and Harry S. Truman. Only Truman won re-election in an anti-Congress campaign that Obama’s team is using as a model.
To counter this the GOP should run against the Senate and the Democratic leadership. The Senate will not even do it’s constitutional duty and pass a budget. The GOP has passed job bills that actually are not government power grabs, balanced budget proposals, regulatory reforms etc and Democrats in the Senate will not even allow them to come to the floor.
Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run.
In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its “worst case” scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment.
The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs.
Both are down significantly from the CBO’s previous worst-case scenario.
The report also lowered the best-case estimate for added growth in 2010 to 4.1% from 4.2%.
In addition, the CBO says the extra infrastructure money didn’t boost growth as much as it previously claimed, because states reacted by spending less out of their own budgets on highways.
So in other words, the CBO now says it’s possible that the stimulus had virtually no meaningful effect on growth and employment despite its massive price tag.
All this comes after the CBO increased that price tag to $825 billion from its initial $787 billion — a 5% hike.
Adding insult to injury, the new report also says the stimulus will hurt economic growth in the long run because of “the resulting increase in government debt.” Each dollar of additional debt, it reports, “crowds out about a third of a dollar’s worth of private domestic capital.”
In our view, even the CBO’s downgraded estimates are too high, because they’re still based entirely on Keynesian economic models that simply assume extra government spending results in added economic growth.
You don’t have to look very hard to see this isn’t what happened.
While Obama promised the massive stimulus would “ignite spending by businesses and consumers,” unleash “a new wave of innovation, activity and construction,” and keep unemployment under 8%, what we actually got was the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
[All emphasis ours – Political Arena Editor]
Of course we cannot forget how the government likes to define “Jobs”. It can include one day jobs and short term temps as jobs created as well. Littering can creates a “job” because someone has to pick it up.
This is a talking point we are going to see a great deal of in coming months. It is a slick talking point with high propaganda value because it utilizes the careful omission of key facts to paint a false picture. Ed has a lefty blog and over the years has attempted to spar with me a few times, but the outcome was always the same.
But here in December 2011, we find that drill rig counts are through the roof — about double the equal period of the Bush 8 years, and equal to the total Bush 8 years — domestic oil production has increased each of the three years of the Obama administration, in stark contrast to the previous 7 straight years of decline, and in February 2011 the U.S. became an oil exporting nation again.
Gas didn’t hit $4 a gallon, and is declining now.
Would you like to join the Obama campaign?
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton responds:
No we would not like to join, because we do not join liars. Domestic production in total is up because of permits approved under the Bush Administration. As Democrats always say, we should not drill for new oil because it takes five to ten years to get oil production going once it is approved.
Obama’s illegal offshore drilling ban has Gulf Oil production down by over 13%. He stopped the Canada pipeline project. He used a loophole in the EPA regs to shut down an oil field in Alaska causing Shell Oil to lose $5 billion. Obama is also yanking coal permits arbitrarily and is pushing to have power plants and refineries closed with regulatory catch 22’s.
Obama is also using some lizard as an excuse to shut down new oil finds in Texas.
Nice try Ed, but as usual, I am more informed and just plain more honest than you.
[Originally posted on my old college blog in April 2010, Newt Gingrich says that the CBO is next to useless and needs to go. It would seem that he is correct – Editor]
Amity Schlaes is perhaps the greatest living economic historian.
I like how Schlaes describes how the CBO works, they are asked to score what is placed in their box and that includes the assumptions they are asked to make in the request.
For example Ann Coulter once made the following analogy. If Congress proposed a new “green energy bill” that assumed that there was a car that ran on grass and got 1000 miles per gallon of grass the CBO would tell us that our dependency on foreign oil would drop significantly.
The question is how can lawmakers get away with their misrepresentation? One answer lies in the structure of the Congressional Budget Office, the government’s official accountant. Its job is to establish an honest price: to tell legislators and voters what a policy will cost in the short, medium and long terms. That CBO work is important because Americans rightly sense that the politicians’ math is rigged.
Amity Shlaes
“Nobody told me you were cheating.
Aww, it’s just a feeling I had.”
Flawed Assumptions
The CBO’s rules make it hard for the group to fulfill its own mandate. You’d think, for example, that the CBO would use its own parameters when it crunches numbers. Instead, the CBO must use the same mathematical assumptions supplied by the very lawmakers who wrote the bill the group is evaluating. No matter how improbable those formulas are.
Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, writing in the New York Times, described the group’s process as “fantasy in, fantasy out.”
CBO rules often preclude common sense. Its forecasters can’t take into account any other legislation when studying the price tag of a proposed bill. That enabled the forecasters costing out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill to overlook this fact: Medicare spending increases will force tax increases, which in turn will hurt growth.
Political Salesmen
This dynamic is permitted because the answers the CBO supplies make it easier for politicians to sell their bills. They’re happy. And so, for the moment, are voters who are painfully aware that the U.S. federal budget can’t cover new entitlements, yet accept such legislation as a balm for that pain.
“So if I’m right, you got to lie to me
Then I won’t feel so bad.”
The CBO’s structural failure benefits the Democrats this week. Indeed, Pelosi is teaching Republicans something: the bigger the misrepresentation, the greater the credibility with voters. Croon to them a tune about entitlement, and they forget that you’re clearing a path for a tripling of the tax on dividends.
The CBO’s rules are bipartisan — they hold for whatever legislation lands in its in box. Congressman Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, recently put forward a new blueprint for the federal budget. Ryan’s plan is less questionable than Pelosi’s because it’s relatively honest about costs. Ryan points out that the current unfunded part of the Medicare liability is in the trillions.
Welcome to yet another episode if Chicago style machine politics brought to DC by the Daley Machine Obama Administration. Lately we have seen one “Solyndra” after another.
Gen. William Shelton, commander of the Air Force Space Command,
told House members in a classified briefing earlier this month that he was pressured to change prepared congressional testimony in a way that would favor a large company funded by Philip Falcone, a major Democratic donor, congressional sources told Fox News.
Republicans have raised questions about whether the project pursued by the company, LightSquared, is being unduly expedited by the Obama administration, which has pushed for national wireless network upgrades.
Solyndra II? At a classified briefing, head of the Air Force Space Command Gen. William Shelton informed House members that he had been pressured to change prepared congressional testimony in order to better compliment a Virginia-based satellite and communications company funded by major Democratic donor Philip Falcone. The GOP has been wondering for some time now whether work done by that company, LightSquared, has been “unduly expedited” by the Obama administration in its push for nation-wide wireless network upgrades.
As Shelton sees it, the company’s plans for its national 4G phone network would seriously compromise the effectiveness of high-precision GPS receiver systems used by the military, given that its spectrum would be about 5 billion times stronger than the military’s GPS system.
Appearing before the House Armed Services subcommittee yesterday, Shelton alleged that he’d repeatedly been pressured to say that “the interference problems could be mitigated” and that he’d been “asked to say things I didn’t agree with.”
Many cases of more of the same. Of course another aspect of this story is that it is the view of this editor that the military’s reliance on GPS is a mistake. GPS jamming technology is cheap and easy to make or buy. In fact. most anyone with a little electronics and ham radio training could make one with ease. It is almost a certainty that potential targets of US missiles and smart bombs such as Iran have installed these jamming devices around their country.
This is a solid piece by Phyllis Schlafly, the matriarch of the conservative movement, where she makes what is perhaps the most important point in the campaign. The American people feel the nation’s decline and most people can feel the change in the national consciousness. Having recently finished a new degree I can tell you that even most students feel it. Talk radio has talked about how Obama is presiding over the nations decline and President Obama is telling is that American exceptionalism is no better than Greek exceptionalism. We are not getting this message with moral clarity and boldness from our candidates, or at least that is how it seems in the elite media.
For those of us who have been paying close attention though, Former Speaker Newt Gingrich has been saying these things. He is the only candidate who calls out President Obama, and many in his staff, as the Saul Alinsky radicals they certainly are. The media does not like reporting it, but it is there and will be unavoidable if Newt is the nominee. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, while not a candidate, has been calling out Obama and his friends as Saul Alinsky neo-Marxist radicals since 2008. Mayor Giuliani is very falimiar with the violent radical left and their front groups such as SEIU and ACORN.
Despite the inordinate quantity of press coverage about next year’s presidential election and attention to TV debates, plus the consuming desire of the media to predict who will win in 2012, the polls show that no candidate in either party is reaching 50 percent public support.
Meanwhile, the NBC News/WallStreetJournal poll, conducted jointly by Democrats and Republicans, reports that 74 percent of Americans think our government is taking us in the wrong direction, and only 17 percent think we are on the right track. Other polls are similar, with Gallup reporting 85 percent dissatisfied with the way our country is headed, and only 13 percent satisfied.
The locals are restless, the grassroots are demanding change, and the Tea Partiers are expecting results, but Congress is stalemated and President Obama spends his time fundraising and campaigning for his own reelection. Why hasn’t any candidate been able to ride citizen dissatisfaction into majority support?
I recommend that every presidential candidate read three books to understand why they don’t get it. First, they should read the best book about Barack Obama, Radical-in-Chief, which explains how he became a Socialist while attending Columbia University.
Nobody knew anything about what was called the “lost chapter” of Obama’s life until a real scholar, Stanley Kurtz, did the original research. The highlight was a 1985 Socialist Scholars Conference addressed by Frances Fox Piven, known for advocating the Cloward-Piven strategy of killing capitalism by loading more and more people on welfare.
The presidential candidates should then read two books that explain in depressing detail why grassroots Americans are convinced that our government is taking us in the wrong direction and over a cliff before our children and grandchildren will ever achieve the American dream. Those two new books are Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Patrick J. Buchanan and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn.
Those books will help the candidates understand, and maybe even develop some empathy for the Americans whose votes they seek and must have if they are to win.
Buchanan explains how the America most adults grew up in is fast disappearing. Americans resent the dictatorial, undemocratic way that elitists in the media, academia, the bureaucracy, and the courts have spit on the foundations of our culture.
Those elite opinion sources have carried on a war against our Judeo-Christian faith, traditional marriage, and our patriotic belief that America is exceptional and should be militarily superior. They have trashed and tried to abolish symbols we cherish such as the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and a cross erected in a public place to honor our veterans.
Those same elitists, using the power of government, have destroyed the economic stability of the family by legalizing unilateral divorce, giving enormous taxpayer subsidies to single moms which discriminate against marriage, adopting so-called free-trade policies that shipped millions of good jobs overseas, importing millions of foreigners from Third World countries to take the remaining jobs away from Americans, and enforcing so-called affirmative action policies that discriminate against white men. They are replacing e pluribus unum with what Theodore Roosevelt warned against: unrestrained immigration that will make us “a ‘polyglot boarding house‘ for the world.”
Buchanan is eloquent in describing the coordinated attack on Christian America and its replacement with the new religion of diversity, using the language of political correctness. Equality, a French-Revolution word that does not appear in any of America’s founding documents, has been elevated to become our national goal instead of liberty.
Buchanan cherishes the hope that our political leaders will, in time, recognize that enough Americans still want to remain one nation under God and one people united by history, heritage and language. He gives specific suggestions for how we can avoid driving off the cliff into national suicide.
Mark Steyn’s book delivers the same message, but in his uniquely different and delightful style. As Ann Coulter said, “Only Mark Steyn can write about the decline of America and leave you laughing.”
Steyn is particularly critical of the failure of our educational system. In 1940, a majority of Americans were schooled only from grade one to grade eight, and they grew up to be the greatest generation.
Now the plan is to keep kids in school from pre-Kindergarten until their mid or late twenties, laden with debt and coached to accept dependence rather than liberty. And worse, it isn’t clear they have learned anything useful.
Steyn puts it to us bluntly: we can rediscover the animating principles of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the freedom to exploit our talents, or we can join the rest of the world in terminal decline. His message is, “if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you. Your call, America.”
A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.
“These rock-solid Obama constituents are free-agents,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of The Polling Company, based in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a large survey of college grads, and “they’re shopping around, considering their options, [and] a fair number will stay at home and sit it out,” she said.
The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.
That’s a drop of almost 60 points in support for Obama among this influential class of younger post-grad voters, who Maddalone recruited at conferences held at New York University and Thomson-Reuters’ New York headquarters.
The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by a job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.
Overall, roughly one-third of young voters have some college education, and one-half have college degrees, said Conway. Many are underemployed or unemployed, they’re worried about their debts and economic trends, and they’re worried about the value of their educations, she said. In 2012, she said, “I suspect a fair number will return to Obama, but maybe not enough, and not in the [swing] states where he needs them,” she said.
Those states include Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Indiana, Virginia and Iowa, she said. All were won by Obama in 2008, and all were lost in state-wide elections to GOP candidates in 2010, she said.
The GOP is making some progress towards earning their votes, Maddalone said. For example, 38 percent of his respondents said the GOP is “doing a good job addressing and engaging with young professionals,” and 58 percent said they would consider voting for the GOP “if you felt that Republicans were doing a good job addressing and engaging with young professionals.”
“DVD sales are easy money and so are internet sales. While the first three episodes of The Playboy Club are on Hulu, the other seven episodes will not be made available on any internet service or DVD. The networks are not in the business of turning away easy money…”
Cast of ‘The Playboy Club’ on NBC
One might wonder why we would ask such a question, but by the end of this article you will not be so uncertain.
Sometimes television can reflect history, but sometimes it can be recreated too perfectly as is the case with NBC’s The Playboy Club.
The new TV show The Playboy Club takes place in early 1960s Chicago. And if you’re going to do a series about Chicago, you have to include a political angle, right? As the saying goes, Chicago is to politics as Paris is to romance. The Playboy Club, of course, wants to be about both.
So one of the main characters is a young lawyer named Nick Dalton, who wants to leave his past as an Outfit mouthpiece behind and become Cook County State’s Attorney. The Outfit, though, doesn’t want to leave Dalton behind. Dalton constantly hounded by the son of crime boss Bruno Bianchi, who reminds him that the mob can help him get ahead in politics.
In 1964 Chicago, only one man could help you get elected state’s attorney: Mayor Richard J. Daley, chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee.
Among local offices, state’s attorney was second only in importance to the mayor. It was important to have a Regular in there, who wouldn’t prosecute the Machine. In 1960, Daley handpicked Daniel Ward, who looked clean because he was the dean of the DePaul University Law School, to run against Republican incumbent Benjamin Adamowski. Adamowski had to go because he was investigating city workers for taking bribes to allow a trucking company to short-weight construction supplies. Legend has it that Daley stole the 1960 election for John F. Kennedy. But he stole just as many votes for Ward, who won by 25,000.
Given Daley’s concern with looking proper, it’s impossible to imagine him slating an ex-Mob lawyer. Daley wasn’t mentioned on The Playboy Club, but he’s an interesting part of the story, and not just because of his power to elect a state’s attorney.
The New York Times wrote about the political impact of the show:
Crime, Sex, Politics and Regular Folks
In the world of prime-time television, Chicago is home to rough-and-tumble politics, street-smart cops and robbers, and the sexiest nightclub of its time, as well as to plenty of down-to-earth folks who make you wonder how that nightclub arose in their midst.
That may not be the way Chicagoans see themselves, but it describes the city’s image as viewed through the lens of modern-day television. Most Americans get their idea of the nation’s cities from what they see on TV.
And that, Political Arena readers, is why ‘The Playboy Club’ had to go.
Indeed in one episode Hugh Hefner’s lawyer pays off the Daley machine with a “donation” of a Jaguar.
This administration has been rife with “pay to play: Chicago style corruption scandals such as Solyndra, BrightSource, and BP; the Goldman Sachs and lobbyist revolving door in the administration, the picking of winners and losers, the illegal offshore drilling ban, the shutdown “green energy competition” such as the Keystone Canadian Oil Pipeline, the yanking of perfectly valid coal mining permits, EPA regulatory shutdown of American power plants, the steering of stimulus funds to Democrat donors and political districts, the favors handed out to White House allies in ObamaCare, the huge political payoffs to get the votes of a few resistant Democrats for key votes, the closing of GM dealerships owned by Republican political donors, the list can go on to fill the page.
A little Chicago style persuasion is nothing new for this administration.
Remember the Ford commercial with the average Joe who said that one of the reasons he bought a Ford was because it didn’t take bail-out funds? It struck a chord with many people and received a great deal of attention.
On Tuesday, Detroit News reporter Daniel Howes reported that White House officials leaned on Ford Motor Company to yank a popular TV and Internet ad critical of competitors who took federal bailout money. According to Howes, “Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House” questioned the firm’s CEO Alan Mulally (who had earlier supported the bailout despite his company’s refusal to participate). Howes concluded: “You’re not allowed, in Obama’s America, to disparage the auto bailout, or — indirectly — Obama. Especially during the election cycle.”
Both Ford and the White House officially deny any political pressure received or applied. But White House press flack Dan Pfeiffer refused to answer when I asked him whether anyone at the White House had ever contacted anyone at Ford to complain about the bailout ad.
So the Washington Post comes to the administration’s defense:
A left-wing Washington Post writer immediately scoffed at concerns about the administration’s heavy hand because the Ford fiasco “is being denied by the parties on both sides.” Must be nice to mainline White House talking points for a living. For the rest of us, reality intrudes.
The Washington Post this morning ran an excellent piece about how President Obama has come up way short on his promises to help the housing market.
And so . . .
Today, Obama will travel to Las Vegas where he will outline new steps to help borrowers refinance. The White House leaked the story to the Post’s chief competitors on the national newspaper scene, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as Reuters.
CBS has been caving and is making Atkisson “unavailable”. She will be lucky to have a job after this is over:
Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.
I’ve also heard from a producer at another media outlet that has previously booked Attkisson that they tried to book her since she made news with the Laura Ingraham interview yesterday. They were also told that she would be unavailable.
Recall what Attkisson told Ingraham yesterday: [The White House and Justice Department] will tell you that I’m the only reporter–as they told me–that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.
The White House banned a reporter from the press pool because she covered some citizens who were protesting President Obama. When called on this as the obvious intimidation that it was, the White House denied yanking her passes, yet every reporter in the pool knows darn well that the reporter was banned. SF Gate:
In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.
Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:
Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.
The Chronicle’s report is accurate.
If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we
would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.
The White House has threatened to use regulatory action to punish insurance companies, health care providers etc to keep them from telling their customers about how ObamaCare and other Democrat legislation is going to raise proces and interfere with care:
Michael Barone: Gangster government stifles criticism of ObamaCare – LINK
There are some, and I suspect many, Democrat operatives in the elite media who are all for this kind of behavior, so long as they are not the victim of it. CNN political analyst Roland Martin advocated that Obama Go “Chigaco-Style Al Capone Gangsta” on political opponents:
Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ‘em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price.
Of course how can we forget what the Democrats did to ABC. I wrote this piece for my college blog in 2006:
Democrats Threaten Broadcast License of ABC Over Path to 9/11 Film
Democrats have issued a thinly veiled threat against ABC’s broadcast license over their 9/11 miniseries, The Path to 9/11, set to air last Saturday night, in a press release issued by the Office of the Senate Democratic Leader last Thursday. Bill Clinton contacted ABC CEO Robert Iger in an effort to yank the film. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer and producer of the film, said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that political pressure from Democrats is causing edits to the film.
So partisan Democrats I have a question for you. Where is all the squawking about oppressing free speech now? Allow me to refresh your memory. When The Department of Defense issued a press release saying that they were hiring a public relations team to help counter enemy propaganda it was called an “assault on free speech.”
When the Justice Department investigated a series of classified leaks from the CIA to the New York Times it was called a “witch hunt” and a violation of the free speech rights of the Times. The leaker, Mary O’Neil, was appointed to Clinton’s National Security Council by former NSC Chief Sandy Berger, who later went to work for the Inspector General’s office in the CIA. Her job was to find leakers. Democrat talking heads in the media said that it would violate O’Neil’s free speech rights if she were prosecuted for leaking classified information….. no kidding. Let us not forget that Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to stealing and altering secret documents from the National Security Archive in preparation for the 9/11 Commission’s investigation.
The film was made in consultation with 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, “which praised the film’s ‘commitment to accuracy’ and ‘sincere respect for the subject’ ‘I worked closely with the filmmakers and the network to ensure the mini-series accurately reflects both the facts and the spirit of the Commission’s findings,’ wrote Kean” (http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060908-045948-7634r).
Clinton attorney Bruce R. Lindsey, who runs Clinton’s foundation, “wrote Kean last night that he was ‘shocked’ by the former New Jersey governor’s role, saying: ‘Your defense of the outright lies in this film is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission and tarnishing the hard work of your fellow commissioners.’”
So it boils down to this, who are we to believe: Bill Clinton, whose propensity to tell lies has not only been proven, but is renown in the American political lexicon; Sandy Berger, who stands convicted of stealing and altering documents from the National Security Archive to “prepare” for the 9/11 Commission investigation; or Thomas Kean, the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission? Even an NEA lobbyist knows the answer to this.
Be sure to read the rest of the piece HERE. ABC cowed to political pressure from the Democrats and edited out parts of the film that were confirmed as accurate. Not only were members of the 9/11 Commission on hand during production to insure accuracy, Dr. Michael Sheuer, the former head of the CIA’s “Bin Laden Unit” was also consulting. Dr. Sheuer wrote a book bashing President Bush so one cannot say that it was a “right-wing hit job” with any credibility.
The naked will to censor the film by the Democratic leadership inspired the production of a new documentary film called Blocking the Path to 9/11. Ironically those who produced The Path to 9/11 said that they expected to be on the receiving end of political heat from Republicans. Some things you just have to see for yourself:
NBC’s cable news channel also jumped on the anti-Path to 9/11 bandwagon.
ABC, in spite of high demand, refuses to release The Path to 9/11 on DVD. DVD sales are easy money and so are internet sales such as Netflix and Hulu. While the first three episodes of The Playboy Club are on Hulu, the other seven episodes will not be made available on any internet service or DVD. The networks are not in the business of turning away easy money.
Like NBC, ABC sure has learned its lesson about airing anything that Democrats might not approve of:
ABC does an infomercial for ObamaCare yet refuses health care ads from Republicans – LINK (2)
ABC saying that “Limbaugh has a history of making racially offensive comments” – but offered no proof – LINK
ABC: If you oppose Obama on policy, your racist – LINK
ABC cut out key substantive portions of the Palin interview (the parts that showed how knowledgeable she was) – LINK (More on that interview HERE and HERE)
Another ABC interview of Sarah Palin where substantive parts of her answers are edited out – LINK
ABC questions asked to Republicans vs Democrats – LINK
ABC’s Sawyer: ‘Protesters Roaming’ DC, ‘Increasingly Emotional, Yelling Slurs and Epithets’ – again no proof in the video – LINK
ABC Gushes Over Patrick Kennedy and Ted’s Fight for Health Care: ‘Dad’s Final Wish’ Came True – LINK
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Argues With McCain on Health Care: ‘What Would You Say’ to Ted Kennedy? – LINK
ABC’s Cokie Roberts: Glenn Beck ‘Corrupting’ Democracy, a ‘Traitor’ to American Values – LINK
Glenn Beck blasts ABC for doctoring clips in smear piece – LINK
ABC Casts Democrats as Profiles in Courage, Republicans as Grief-Exploiting Meanies – LINK
ABC News engages in blatant misrepresentation in anti- TEA Party hit piece – LINK
ABC News Managing Editor: I didn’t even know about the ACORN story – LINK
‘Liberal’ ABC Radio Boss Firing Profitable Conservative Hosts, Hannity Leaves ABC Syndicator – LINK
Howard Kurtz Blasts ABC for Dumping Andrew Breitbart from Election Coverage Because of “Newsroom Uprising” – LINK
President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official.
It’s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out.
The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle.
Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.
From an objective vantage point, investing taxpayer monies in BrightSource was a risky proposition at the time. In 2010, BrightSource, whose largest shareholder is Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, was up to its eyes in $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million on its paltry $13.5 million of revenue.
Even before BrightSource rattled its tin cup in front of Obama’s DOE, the company made it known publicly that its survival hinged on successfully completing the Ivanpah Solar Electrical System, which would become the largest solar plant in the world, on federal lands in California.
In its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, BrightSource further underscored the risky nature of the Ivanpah venture and, more broadly, the company’s viability:
Our future success depends on our ability to construct Ivanpah, our first utility-scale solar thermal power project, in a cost-effective and timely manner… Our ability to complete Ivanpah and the planning, development and construction of all three phases are subject to significant risk and uncertainty.
Ironically, in 2008, Kennedy wrote a CNN article praising Obama as reminiscent of his famous father and uncle. The article, titled “Obama’s Energy Plan Would Create a Green Gold Rush,” proved prophetic. However, the “green gold rush” came in the form of $1.4 billion of taxpayers’ money flowing into the pet projects of rich venture capital investors like Kennedy, not average citizens.
This video is remarkable to see for those who are not trained in how Washington works. The first millionaire in the video says that their group got rich because of the deficit spending done in Washington, so lets raise taxes [so that the government can do more spending and you same greedy bastards can get even wealthier by sucking at the government tit while donating some of that money back to Obama]. The people at Solyndra and these other green energy companies that donated heavily to Obama took our money, paid themselves, donated to Democrats and promptly went out of business.
Washington — Two dozen “patriotic millionaires” traveled to the Capitol on Wednesday to demand that Congress raise taxes on wealthy Americans.
The Daily Caller attended their press conference with an iPad, which displayed the Treasury Department’s donation page, to find out if any of the “patriotic millionaires” were willing to put their money where their mouth is.
And indeed it is perfectly legal. This is what you get when you have a 60,000 page tax code filled with loopholes (some justified some not), favors, cronyism and every incentive there can be to make money overseas instead of at home because we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. So how can we have the highest rate in the world and this still happens? You are about to find out and it involves putting Americans out of work to do it.
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. “GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions–it’s legal,” Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE’s profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn’t taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
“I asked the GE tax officer, ‘How long was your tax form?'” Ryan said. “He said, ‘Well, we file electronically, we don’t measure in pages.'” Ryan asked for an estimate, which came back at a stunning 57,000 pages. When Ryan relayed the story at the townhall meeting in Janesville, there were audible gasps from the crowd.
Ken Kies, a tax lawyer who represents GE, confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD the tax return would have been 57,000 pages had it been filed on paper. The size of GE’s tax return has more than doubled in the last five years.
Ryan used the data point to underscore the irrationality of the corporate income tax code. He also contrasted GE with UPS to make the point that the corporate income tax code doesn’t make sense. “UPS paid a 34 percent effective tax rate,” while its biggest foreign competitor, DHL, paid a 24 percent tax rate, Ryan said.
The problems with the corporate taxes occur because “Republicans and Democrats, both parties, sit in Congress and they’re picking winners and losers,” Ryan said. The solution, according to the Wisconsin congressman: “Get rid of those loopholes and lower tax rates by a corresponding amount. Don’t lose revenue, but for every loophole you pull out, and deny a company from being able to get this little carveout, you can lower the rates so we can be more competitive with our competitors overseas. We want to stem the bleeding of jobs going overseas, of foreign companies buying U.S. companies and taking headquarters overseas.”
A textbook example of media bias. The subtext of the story “smart conservatives agree with Obama” and they push that bias by presenting a partisan view as “the expert’s view”
You might be thinking “Now wait a minute, it was fair because they had Jay Sekulow on”. That sounds good but look at the story again. NBC has Jay Sekulow on for the 29 states opposing ObamaCare, but then they have the Maryland politician who advocates the Obama point of view which is that the commerce clause gives the government unlimited power to control our lives, err I mean the economy [because you cannot control the economy with out controlling people /wink wink, nod nod].
So we have one advocate from each side, OK that is fair so far, but then the “expert” is brought in. We know this because NBC put the word “expert” right under Tom Goldstein’s name. Of course Tom Goldstein has experience covering the court, but he is no more of an expert than Jay Sekulow or Mark Levin. What they don’t tell you is that Tom Goldstein was a lawyer for Al Gore.
When NBC or an elite media outfit looks for a talking head they wish to present as “the experts”, they do not pick an expert at random and ask him “What do you think?”. They find a person they can present as an expert who will say exactly what they want said. This is a very common practice in news rooms all across the country.
Of course ObamaCare is unconstitutional. The Maryland politician says that everyone uses health care so the Commerce Clause covers it. Well everyone eats too, and everyone needs shelter, everyone needs clothes. So was it the intent of the Founding Fathers to have a government that is totally unlimited? ObamaCare is unconstitutional because it takes the entire idea of limited government and tosses it right out the window. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, addressed the idea of reinterpreting a clause in the Constitution to give the federal Government total power.
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, everything, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.
So where did this crazy idea of a nearly unlimited Commerce Clause come from? Shortly before WWII FDR was not able to advance parts of his socialist progressive plan because the Supreme Court kept striking down laws his party was passing. So FDR threatened to add members to the Supreme Court using Article II of the Constitution to add perhaps a dozen seats to the Supreme Court all filled with cronies. In fear of this the Supreme Court capitulated ” and expanded the Commerce Clause in a way that had never been intended to please FDR. This became known as FDR’s court packing threat.
Like it or not—and many of us don’t like it at all — U.S. taxpayers are helping to bail out Greece and the rest of the financially-distressed euro zone. The International Monetary Fund has committed to providing the Europeans with a financing package totaling about 250 billion euros. The portion provided by American taxpayers, based on our 17.09% share of contributions to the IMF, is now at least $54 billion.
A handful of congressional Republicans steeped in the fiscal conservatism of the Tea Party have been agitating against backdoor U.S. bailouts for several years. In May 2010, for instance, Reps. Mike Pence of Indiana and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, along with Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, introduced a bill prohibiting the IMF from using U.S. funds for the bailout of any foreign country in Greek-like straits. Similarly, Republicans in June 2009 attempted to block a $100 billion appropriation to the IMF for a $1.1 trillion economic-crisis bailout fund.
President Obama, who had pledged the money during a G-20 meeting that year, had buried the appropriation in a war-funding measure to avoid an up or down vote on the unpopular item. This outraged Minnesota Rep. John Kline, another Republican, who fumed: “I cannot support a bill that uses our military personnel currently in harm’s way to advance a political agenda that includes a $100 billion international bailout that has nothing to do with our troops’ safety or success.” And Kline added: “Already this year, Congress has forced taxpayers to shoulder $700 billion in bailout money, $1 trillion on a so-called stimulus, $410 billion on a massive spending bill larded with pork-barrel projects and $3.6 trillion on a budget that spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much. We should not tack on an additional $100 billion for an international bailout.”
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
, which explains how he became a Socialist while attending Columbia University.
by Patrick J. Buchanan and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon
by Mark Steyn.
Political Arena 